Twenty World Heritage Areas are recognised in Australia by UNESCO for their unique cultural, geographical, and biological diversity. While these areas support outstanding universal values, they are under risk from disease, invasive species, and declining ecosystem processes. The speakers and panellists, drawn from the scientific community and on-the-ground conservation practitioners, discussed the benefits and challenges of integrating climate change and biodiversity knowledge in developing adaptive management plans to build more resilience in both species and ecosystems. They also clearly identified that existing ecological pressures are being exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate.

There were two featured speakers and five panellists discussing these pressing conservation issues – you can read more about each of them here.

Melinda Laidlaw, a Senior Ecologist with the Queensland Herbarium, gave a fascinating talk on a number of the decision tools employed for modelling past, current and future species habitats and investigating the impacts of climate change on the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area.

Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat across Queensland pre-clearing	Density of terrestrial threatened flora habitat remaining as remnant vegetation in 2015
Source: State of the Environment – Queensland Department of Environment and Science.

 
Dave Newell, a Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University, spoke passionately about his work on understanding the ecology of endangered amphibians, most of which are narrow range endemics susceptible to climate change and disease impacts. Dave and his students’ work in the World Heritage rainforests of northern NSW over several decades has improved conservation outcomes for some of Australia’s most unique frogs.

Dave Newell – illustrating in more detail the process for modelling potential rainforest frog distributions

In response to audience questions, the panellists also discussed other threatening processes like extreme bushfire events and invasive diseases such as Myrtle Rust, the importance of new research into understanding the importance of ‘cloud water’ as a key survival strategy for some montane species, and the necessity of on-the-ground community coordination of conservation efforts.

I will add a link to the full webinar recording when it becomes available, or you will find it here in coming days.

The next webinar in this series is ‘Carbon sequestration & biodiversity: valuing & managing carbon-rich systems‘, scheduled for Tue, 13 October 2020 – I commend this series to you.

Species habitat modelling is an area I’ve long been interested in (I was a fairly early user of BIOCLIM in my work at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, too many years ago) and more recently wrote on the utility of using the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL).

Gaia Resources has worked with another NESP Hub – Clean Air Urban Landscapes – in recent years to build their Urban Wildlife mobile app. If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources could work with you in this area, then please drop me a line at alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Evidence-based planning for resilient World Heritage Areas appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This years theme was Phytophthora Dieback – Tools for the Future, covering a range of contemporary topics such as recent developments in research and technology, and insights on industry engagement and land management. As with many events during the COVID-19 situation, the conference allowed the opportunity for experts, speakers and attendees to join together in person or online to contribute from local, state and international perspectives.

Some significant highlights for us included:

• the chance to catch up with many of our south coast clients
• learning about their work current practices and future directions, and how Gaia Resources can help
• the potential use of Phytophthora Dieback management practices in other industries, e.g. in managing other soil-borne diseases
• seeing how management goals have shifted over the years in response to previous management outcomes

The best highlight for me was the field trip to the beautiful Wireless Hill Park for a demonstration of Phytophthora Dieback management practices.

Tilo Massenbauer or Tilomass Consulting discusses the dynamics of public behavioural change	A demonstration of sampling a Phytophthora Dieback infested plant specimen
Anigozanthos manglesii at Wireless Hill Park, Perth	Diuris corymbosa at Wireless Hill Park, Perth

If you’d like to know more about our work in this area, please drop me a line at tracey.cousens@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

The post Dieback Conference 2020 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Over four sessions presentations were given by researchers from Science, Agriculture, Business and Law faculties at WA’s universities as well as practitioners in the arenas of farming, catchment management, policy and conservation. Briefly, the subject topics covered included:

1. Climate change science –

• Setting the context with the latest science in a range of environmental and human health areas, and
• Specific figures on our State’s current and projected emissions with respect to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement.

2. Legal and policy perspectives from both carbon export and import countries –

• Case studies from Australian and Canadian exporters, and
• Chinese imports of Australian LNG: Implications for Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGe), including proposal options for an Emissions Trading Scheme and transparency and national standards required for effective monitoring, reporting and verification.

3. Opportunities for a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy, such as –

• Livestock industries need for a combination of methane mitigation, vegetation management and offset strategies, and
• Consideration of GHGe to achieve net zero GHGe economy look likely to change the nature of Environmental Impact Assessment practice as we know it and currently practice it.

Of all the valuable information and analysis presented during this seminar, the following two graphs (Figure 1) spoke to just how big the task ahead is for us collectively in Western Australia.

Figure 1. These two graphs illustrate how WA’s GHGe’s are tracking with reference to Australia’s 2030 Paris Agreement commitments. (These figures, presented at the seminar, are taken with permission from the forthcoming Conservation Council of WA publication ‘CCWA & Clean State Report: September 2019’.)

Australia’s international commitment under the Paris Agreement requires pollution to be reduced by 26-28% from the 2005 baseline year. But current and proposed projects since 2005 are predicted to add 41.6 million tonnes of pollution per year, equivalent to a 61% increase on WA’s 2005 emissions baseline, and an 8% increase above Australia’s 2005 baseline.  WA’s energy minister has previously said the State would have an “aspirational” target of net zero emissions by 2050 and acknowledged the federal government’s 26%-28% reduction target by 2030 and would commit to “working with the commonwealth to achieve this goal”.

There’s clearly a lot of improvements to be had and we’re keen to find ways we can make a positive difference.

As an environmental technology company, Gaia Resources keeps abreast of current trends. As our mission statement says:

Gaia Resources is a consultancy that responsibly delivers
sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place.

We work on big data projects in areas like biodiversity, health and the environment – you can see this in the scope of our project portfolio. As a good corporate citizen, Gaia Resources applies a “core values test” to all projects that are proposed to us, to see if the projects will “make the world a better place”.  Certainly, working with companies to reduce their carbon emissions has a big part to play in making that improvement!

If you’d like to give us your feedback on the issues presented here, or want to know how we can help with tracking, monitoring and reducing carbon emissions, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post A Carbon Budget for Western Australia appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Once the Terms and Conditions are accepted, one can call an emergency hotline, find out more information about notifiable diseases, or start filling out a new notification. As the info link tells us “Early recognition of a serious or exotic animal disease is one of the most important factors influencing the chance of controlling the disease and reducing economic and social impact on the whole community.”

   
The Home page of the app (left) provides a number of resources to start a notification, find out more information or provide feedback. A graphic based pick list (right) allows for quick selection of an animal type before moving to the next step in the workflow.

Our client Sally Salmon at the Chief Veterinary Officer’s Unit, gives us the back story:

“Agriculture Victoria engaged Gaia Resources to develop a smart phone app that would allow users to easily and quickly notify the Department of the presence or suspicion of notifiable animal diseases. The app is primarily directed to vets, but it can also be used by animal owners, primary producers, livestock agents and other people who work with animals.”

“The key parts of the app are the ability to call the Exotic Animal Disease hotline, add geo-located pictures to the submission, and include all the details required under the Livestock Disease Control Act 1994.  The information goes directly to the Chief Veterinary Officer’s Unit email inbox.”

   
The map and geocoding feature (left) reduces time to enter address details; and the form entry details – which include pick lists and conditional field display (right) – are compiled along with photographs into an email notification. 

“The development included testing phases with a large number of Agriculture Victoria staff.

The app is available now on the App Store and Google Play, just search for ‘Notify Now’.”

“More information on notifiable diseases is available at the AgVic web site, http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/agriculture/pests-diseases-and-weeds/animal-diseases/notifiable-diseases.”

We are looking forward to seeing how vets and animal owners across Victoria think of the app and how much easier it makes reporting over the manual PDF form download approach. As with so many professions, it makes a big difference if you can apply some technological smarts to help people ‘find time’ and focus on their core work. This includes time saved by the staff at DJPR who can quickly act on a submitted notification.

As a side note, our team has increasingly been working on Health-related projects, and in this context – I would just like to draw attention to the interrelationships between human health, environmental health and animal health. It has been interesting to pick up through discussions and research that a “One Health” concept is seen as an important component of an effective and holistic health system; that we need to consider the health of our animals and food chain, as well as the health of the environment we live in.

In time we would like to help government agencies develop analytics capabilities by integrating these systems that might ‘live’ in different agencies or beyond their own servers, to share these different datasets and to monitor trends and relationships. Some of our clients are already reaching out to use technology to do this, and we looking forward to working with them to achieve their objectives.

Feel free to drop send me an email if you want to find out more, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post Notify Now – Victoria launches its Animal Disease Notification App appeared first on Gaia Resources.

At Gaia Resources we’ve been heavily involved in data standards since the early days of the company (and before, in some cases!).  Personally, I have been involved in the reviews of standards like the TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR), and have implemented toolkits to deliver data in the Darwin Core exchange standard.  In previous roles representing Museums I’ve also worked on standards approaches with the Faunal Collections Informatics Group, that supports the Council of the Heads of Australian Faunal Collections.

Alex has a similar background, except from the botanical side. He’s been involved in the technical groups around the Council of the Heads of Australasian Herbaria, specifically with the Herbarium Information Systems Committee that developed the national herbarium specimen data exchange standard HISPID, and was for six years the Oceania representative in the international working group Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG).  Along the way, we’ve all seen and used a range of data standards, unique identifier approaches, metadata standards, exchange standards – and had a lot of hair pulling (we”, metaphorically in my case).

But, why do you need data standards? Let’s look at an example, using something we know pretty well.

In the states of Western Australia and Victoria, where we have implemented the Atlas of Environmental Health.  This has become a de facto data standard for this aspect of the Environmental Health domain.  The Atlas is made freely available to all Local Government Authorities to use in those states through the Departments of Health and Health and Human Services respectively, and this was the first time that a state-wide picture of mosquito trapping results could be implemented without significant data collation efforts.  With a few clicks, you can generate a current map of mosquito populations, like this one we have shown many times before for Victoria:

This map (in the system, not this one above) is dynamic, and so it is constantly up to date with the latest population information.  Right now, to do this for the whole country, you’d have to do the following:

• know what you are looking for (e.g. the size of mosquito populations across Australia),
• extract the data from each of the States from their own systems (some use Access databases, others commercial software, or the Atlas, or other tools),
• undertake an exercise that would look across all of the datasets that have been provided, and work out which fields are the same (the ones containing the coordinates of the observations, species names, dates and abundance figures – which hopefully are all contained in all datasets),
• migrate the data into a single data store, working through things like blanks, spelling mistakes, outdated taxonomy, different coordinate reference systems, etc, and
• then pull this data into a spatial system of some sorts to draw the map shown above.

Frankly, by the time this is done manually – which could take weeks – the information will be so out of date it will be next to useless.  However, if the three data standards above were implemented the process would be:

• all jurisdictions extract the data from their systems (which are compliant with the data standards) into the data exchange standard, which is provided with metadata in accordance to the standard,
• the data is ingested into a new data store (and since all are compliant with the data exchange standard, this is much simpler), with some quality control implemented (still looking at the blanks, spelling mistakes, etc), and
• the data is pulled out into a spatial system for mapping.

This second eventuality should take a matter of minutes to do, assuming that everyone is compliant with the standards.  When groups like the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security, or the National Arbovirus and Malaria Advisory Committee meet up they look at these sorts of reports for each State in paper or digital forms, so there’s a lot of different ways in which that data is presented (we’ve presented at NAMAC once before on the Atlas of Environmental Health).

So, how can we improve on this situation? I’m always fired up when solving interesting problems and as a result I’ve been sketching out ideas on various notebooks while I’ve been researching the area of data standards in the Environmental Health field since late last year, so here’s my take on a way forward.

Firstly, if we were starting from scratch here, what sort of data standards do we need?  At the very least, there should be three data standards developed for the Environmental Health area, namely:

• Metadata standards – standards that we can use to describe the data itself (e.g. this data contains information about mosquito monitoring, ranges from this date to that date, covering the state of Western Australia, etc)
• Data standards – the standard set of fields that we can use in describing the data itself (e.g. using unique identifiers, fields for genus, species, date trapped, time trapped, number of individuals, the weather conditions, controlled vocabularies,  etc), and
• Data exchange standards – a set of fields that can be used in a data extract so that when this data is provided from one group to another it can be readily ingested and used (e.g. genus and species as a single field, date trapped, viruses present, etc).

It’s more than likely there would be many extensions to each, both in terms of digging deeper into controlled vocabularies and unique identifiers, or also in looking at the different aspects of environmental health (e.g. mosquito monitoring fields would be quite different from water quality ones).

I then thought through our work on the Mosquito Monitoring module of the Atlas of Environmental Health. The Atlas allows Environmental Health officers to go out into the environment, and monitor the populations and species diversity of mosquitoes, including capturing them in traps.  The mosquitoes can be then taken to a lab, identified to species level and they can also be tested to see if they carry diseases that will impact on people’s health. From this information, then the Environmental Health officer can determine the best course of action to take to control the mosquito populations in the environment.

At a very simplistic level, this simple workflow got me thinking of Environmental Health” as a combination of the two domains – “Environment” and “Health”.  In one of my whiteboard sessions, I ended up drawing a Venn diagram that got me thinking… there must be plenty of data standards within each of these areas that I could potentially point to and use.

Indeed, for both of these domains, there are a number of existing data standards that can potentially be used to bootstrap the development of new data standards.  As a rough first pass, here’s some of the potential standards from the disciplines of “Environment” and “Health” that could be of use… it’s by no means exhaustive, but there are a range of different ways to capitalise on this information.

I’m sure there are other standards out there that I’ve missed, but it seems to me that there is still a fair bit of work still needed to put together a consolidated set of standards for the Environmental Health area, that matches the needs across the various parts of the field.

I wanted to also be clear that I’m not advocating that everyone needs to use the same system or product, which is often confused with using the same data standard.  The two should be separate so that there can be improvements, contention, and competition so that these systems and products improve. Otherwise, they will stagnate, especially under a monopoly arrangement when one product is prescribed for use.  The key is that all the different systems should use the same data standards, or support the use of the same data exchange standards to ensure data can flow between systems.

If the same data standard was under the hood of the various systems, authorities would be able to readily respond to incidents in a much faster turnaround time.  As a result, the world might just be a little bit better…

If you can think of other standards that we should consider (or you know of some that I just couldn’t find), then please drop me a line, or start a conversation on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.  I’d like to hear what you think, and how we can compile more resources on this!

Piers

The post Data Standards in Environmental Health appeared first on Gaia Resources.

There’s no substitute for face-to-face time when you want to learn about your client’s business and state of mind. By meeting with the public health entomologist, epidemiologists and analytics officers in the Communicable Disease Prevention and Control team I was able to learn a lot about business context and challenges around data, systems and reporting, and also the relationship between communicable diseases and on-ground mosquito monitoring activities. Fortnightly reporting and access to solid, accurate data is critical to fortnightly reporting and managing risk across a range of infections and diseases. Somehow the emails we are so used to using and phone calls boil down to just what you need to know for an immediate task or issue. The context can easily be lost, or not fully translated compared to when you are physically present and seeing what your clients are dealing with.

This trip didn’t have a field excursion like the one we did back in 2017 (see link to that blog here), but just as interesting I was able to sit down with an analytics officer and see how DHHS are tapping into the Atlas and other systems to build up their reporting outputs through PowerBI. Part of our latest phase of work with these guys to build an Application Programming Interface (API) so that analytics packages could draw data from the Atlas and combine that with other Health systems data (e.g. health facilities and their capacity to deal with outbreaks).

The fortnightly reports are part of critical presentations that senior officials in DHHS use to make strategic decisions for the health of Victorians and their facilities. Apart from keeping an eye out for Ross River Virus, health departments in Australia need to monitor for Murray Valley encephalitis virus,  Barmah Forest virus and dengue virus. Lately, Buruli – known as the Bairnsdale ulcer in Victoria, and the Daintree ulcer in Queensland –  has been making the news in Victoria (click here for the Victorian health alert). It is an infection caused by a flesh eating bacteria called Mycobacterium ulcerans that has been on the increase in parts of coastal Victoria,  and the primary theory is that the virus is transmitted by mosquitoes.

Map of Buruli ulcer risk in Victoria (source: Health Victoria alert 18002).

Not all mosquito species carry diseases of course – in most cases they are just an itchy nuisance; however, it is through monitoring, trapping and laboratory species identification that health officials can spot an impending risk of particular species breeding who may carry these viruses. Through the Atlas of Environmental Health we help DHHS to use visualise the location, clustering and temporal patterns of data regularly collected in the field.

The biggest component of our recent phase of work though has been a new Ground Surveillance Module (GSM) mobile application.  The GSM module – currently being tested – focuses on rapidly inspecting and collecting data on breeding sites at a property level. The app has features and a workflow designed for a minimal click experience – like responsive screen progression, GPS based reverse geocoding (a fancy term for pre-populating a property address), and geotagged photographs.

  
Through simple design the app is getting a neat refresh, which includes reverse geocoding

This GSM app will in future incorporate the adult trapping, larval dipping and public complaint functions currently used in our mosquito monitoring app – bringing the existing functionality into a more flexible and easier to maintain application framework. With mobile technology maturing we wanted to ensure that DHHS was able to take advantage of the new features that are on offer. The most significant of these is parallel platform development for iOS and Android, which results in efficiency savings in development and maintenance.

With the GSM app, local government Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) will be able to capture locations of potential breeding sites through property inspections along with information about whether mosquito larvae are present and whether a treatment was applied. In some cases this would be as basic as removing the water source from a bucket or pot, while in others the EHO may be able to apply a treatment or need to return at a later date.  The rapid entry of data is all about increasing capacity of the EHOs to cover more ground, and to generate a more accurate and timely picture of what is happening across their local area. Larvae breeding in a backyard pond or container typically mature in about 2-3 weeks, after which time a different and trickier treatment type is required, so the app and increased coverage is important for DHHS to manage threats of a disease outbreak. As with risks in most disciplines, if you can identify it early you have more choices about mitigation before it turns into an issue.

 
Simple designs using icons and graphics to streamline data capture is very important for efficient use of the app

If you think about what the EHOs are doing as they visit properties, the rapid data entry gives them time to be more public facing and to engage with people in a useful conversation about preventative measures. They can take the time to show residents and business owners where mosquito breeding can happen, and simple approaches to prevent standing water from turning into a problem. Overturning empty buckets and pots, and keeping pool and pond water circulating over winter for instance, can go a long way to avoid both the unpleasant barbecue experience and serious health problems.

So through this latest phase of work we have added a new app for field data collection and have built an API for connecting the Atlas of Environmental Health to other analytics packages. I think 2019 is going to be an interesting time in this space as we look to solidify these tools and ramp up capabilities in data collection and risk reporting. If you’d like to know more about this topic, strike up a conversation with us on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts – or drop us a line on (08) 9227 7309 or email me on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au.

Chris

The post Mosquito ground surveillance – an update appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The post Environmental Health, Data Standards and Open Source Software appeared first on Gaia Resources.

They sure do get large mossies in NSW…

I have been to quite a few of the MCAA events, starting at the 2014 conference in Mandurah where I presented on what we were planning to do with the Atlas, and then again in 2016 at Surfer’s Paradise, where I provided an update.  My attendance at this year’s one kept to my usual MCAA pattern, namely to attend a solid day of the conference to learn more about the work that people using the Atlas do, and to also do another update on the Atlas itself!

My update seemed to be well received – at least there were a few nice tweets about it (check out the #mcaa2018 hashtag for the full conference overview), and I had a few chats to people before and after my presentation.  It’s always a challenge being in the last session stream of a conference, but there was a lot to be seen on that last day – there were drone demonstrations, a range of really interesting presentations, and I think I saw a hangover or two from the dinner the night before, as well.

This year’s presentation (via Slideshare)

In my talk, I finished up with some really important success stories, and none more so than “Barry”.  “Barry” is one of the Victorian local government Environmental Health Officers, and he’s one of the people that’s making the Atlas a better piece of software, via his calls to us directly – he tells us what works, what doesn’t and what he’s having problems with – and that really helps us a lot when we’re trying to diagnose things.  We all decided when I was talking through this that we’d much rather have a “Barry” who calls frequently, with the good and the bad, than no calls at all.  So I will definitely be trying to get that #belikebarry hashtag going in the near future!

In the meantime, we’re working on a few new things with the Department of Health and Human Services, including loading a lot of historical information into the Atlas, creating linkages so that their PowerBI implementation can work directly with the data in the Atlas, and a whole new app component around ground surveillance – which is certainly the bit that interested a lot of people.  Certainly, working in this area with the Atlas has given us a whole bunch of new ways to make a positive outcome to the environment through the use of technology – something that makes the flights, driving, and all that time away from home very much worth it!

The Atlas will continue to be updated and developed over the near future so we can expect a few more updates from Chris and the team who are working on it.  In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about the Atlas, then feel free to contact me via email, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Controlling Mosquitoes with Technology appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This initial abundance map will soon be a lot more complex, with the data coming in to the system from the AgriBio team

This new project, which has started this week, will see the development of a tool to assist the AgriBio researchers to be able bulk load their historical data from standardised lab spreadsheets to the system.  This will mean that they will be able to add in a lot (around 30 years worth!) of historical data on mosquito abundance – and disease prevalence – across Victoria.

This relatively small project for us will have a big impact on the system – we will likely have to scale up the instance of the software to handle the increased volume of data that will be appearing.  Thankfully, as we run the system on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, this will be a really simple process! Unlike physical servers in the office server room, cloud infrastructure is elastic and can be dialled up or down almost instantaneously to meet demand.

With this historical data entering the system, we can also start to review the opportunities for reporting that this provides.  We’ve discussed all sorts of additional reports with the Victorian stakeholders in the Atlas, like heat maps and other specific trend or compliance reporting. Now with larger volumes of data there to start reviewing, we can start to plan ahead for that sort of functionality.

Meanwhile, the local governments will start to see a lot more data arriving in the system so that they can see the patterns of mosquito populations in their regions, which in itself is a great outcome in support of their operations and planning needs.  If you want to know more about the Atlas, feel free to drop me an email, or call our Perth office on (08) 92277309 – or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post Historical Mosquitoes appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We thought that this is an opportune time to release a blog about the updates – Tracey and Chris have also been updating the user manual with all these changes as well, so you can see the details in that online resource.

Streamlining Monitoring

There has been quite a bit of work in the recent updates on the Monitoring component of the Medical Entomology module.  Firstly, there are a range of workflow modifications on the Adult and Larval Monitoring forms to bring them to a more consistent look and feel, which has been something that has bugged a few of us involved in the project (that have some OCD tendencies).  This has mainly been cosmetic, but it certainly means that the system feels a lot more consistent.

One of the new functionality changes is the addition of “Spot Treatment” on the Larval Monitoring forms (see below), which is the first of the treatment components we are releasing (see Chris’ previous blog about further research into treatment areas we ran with the City of Bayswater).

The new Spot Treatment form

The Spot Treatment form simply allows you to record the treatment you might do at the end of a larval monitoring session – i.e. when you have finished dipping at a site, and then decide to immediately treat the site by applying some chemical.  This was an important thing to add, because what this does is allow us to place a specific line showing treatment on the Larval Monitoring reports – so you can start to see the efficacy of the treatment at a site, like in the sample graph we used in testing below – the abundance of larvae drops, and you can see the bright red line indicating this is because of a treatment.

An example chart showing mosquito larvae dropping off after treatment

There has also been a new function added to both monitoring components, namely the integration with the Bureau of Meteorology weather services.

If your site is within a 50km radius of a Bureau of Meteorology weather station, and the date and time on your observation is within the last 72 hours, then we match up to the nearest station and bring across a set of environmental variables from the weather station automatically, and the closest record in terms of time to your observation.  These five fields (air temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind direction and wind speed) are sourced from the weather station live feed, and are then transformed into the units that we use in the Atlas (e.g. converting wind speed from knots to a category value).  This all happens behind the scenes – and even from the mobile apps, which do this populating process when the records arrive at the server after a mobile synchronisation.

The new Bureau of Meteorology weather integration fields

Of course, you can also populate these fields yourself from the field in your own set of forms – as we know that microclimate at the local site might well be quite different from a weather station 50 kilometers away!

Additional Reporting

One of the ‘missing’ components of the Medical Entomology workflow was the Larval Reporting, and that’s been upgraded in this latest release to match the types of reports we also provide for the Adult trapping data, namely:

• Charting site abundance – seeing the total numbers of larvae over time for a site,
• Instar chart site abundance – seeing the breakdown of the various instar percentages over time at a site (as shown above), and
• Abundance map – showing the abundance of larvae on a mapping background.

The interesting one here was the mapping one – in the Adult report we can make a series of pie charts that are coloured by species, but we can’t do the same for larvae.  So in this mapping component, we simply produce a series of different sized circles according to the abundance of larvae, like the map below (using a variety of real and test data for the Victoria).

 An example abundance map for larvae

There’s also been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the graphing components across the board on the graphing and charting components of this component of the system, which has all come about because of the heavy use of the system by our new Victorian counterparts – the amounts of data coming in from them has really given us an impetus to make a range of additional upgrades and changes to the system to account for the new volumes (and high frequency!) of data coming in.

Existing users will also note a couple of additional reporting changes, including the addition of filters on the Review Records screen, and a brand new Export Data function that allows users to export all of their data from the system.  We really feel that these two additional functions are great ways to get more productivity into the Atlas, and both flow on from feedback we’ve had from people using the system.

Chemical stock

One of the new requirements we met within Victoria was around managing chemical stocks, as the Department of Health and Human Services provides all the chemical stock to the local governments for treatment, and sometimes needs to know where to get hold of stock for emergency applications or treatments.  So the basic chemical stock management component was introduced to the system in this update.

The simple stock management functionality

In essence, this chemical stock management system is simple and easy to use, and it is the stub for future work on treatments.  Our plans for the future around treatments are to link up the ability to document a treatment event in the system to the stock management – so when a treatment occurs, the stock levels automatically adjust to indicate these chemicals have been used.  While that’s not yet implemented in the system (e.g. the spot treatment component just has two fields for recording chemicals used, but doesn’t yet link to stock management), it’s a great starting point for a future upgrade.

Collaboration and teams

The final point I wanted to raise was the importance of collaboration throughout this last round of updates.

This round of updates was funded from the Department of Health and Human Services (Victoria), and here at Gaia Resources we have also put in additional resources to ensure that a range of things that we feel are important have been added to the system, so we’ve also funded it in that sense.  That’s not unusual for us – we do feel that many of our projects really are about creating long-lasting partnerships rather than doing simple one-off projects, and we put our time (and money) into these partnerships in a very real sense.  Despite not having ‘skin in the game’ as it were, we still had all of the planning and demonstration meetings open to the WA Department of Health, as they were a previous funder of the system.  This was a big part of how good the end result is – getting the main stakeholders in the room has been a key part of the success of these new functions.  So, having Rebecca Feldman (DHHS), Dr. Peter Neville (DoH) and myself in the room as the three ‘clients’ has been a key part in delivering a great outcome for the project.

This has been a big team approach overall for this round of updates.  On the technical side, Serge, James P and Rob have done wonders on the system to make it jump through all the hoops we have needed it to.  Chris has kept us all on track from the project management point of view, and along with Tracey and myself have updating the user manuals and doing a bunch of testing.  Others in our team – like Shay – have also been brought in to help with particular tasks, like getting the cloud infrastructure tuned for performance. So it’s been a massive team effort that I’m really proud to have been involved with, and I’m really happy with the result.

For more information on the Atlas, feel free to contact either Chris or myself in our Perth office on (08) 92277309 – or as always, you can start a conversation with us via social media on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Atlas of Environmental Health – Medical Entomology Update! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Deep in discussion about technology and treatments at Ashfield Flats

Environmental Health Officers from the City of Bayswater hosted us for a morning out at the Ashfield Flats site, where the team developing and supporting the Atlas (Serge, James, Tracey and myself) along with Peter Neville from the Department of Health, took us through the various types of treatments that are undertaken for mosquitoes.  This involved investigating a range of different treatments including;

• Dipping for mosquito larvae in standing water, and spot treatments
• Various solid treatments including pellets and briquets, and
• Fogging treatments using liquid chemicals.

Some of the chemicals involved in treatment

We learned about the chemicals that are being used, the methods of application and equipment as well.  We saw how simple equipment from your friendly hardware store were put to use, how backpack foggers are operated, and how application techniques over the years have resulted in ingenious and cost-effective methods like floating briquets for tidal areas. We even got to see the amphibious Argo in action which sprays out the pellets across larger areas of mixed land and water.

Serge gets a ride in the Argo

We came along to this session to learn about treatment from those who are on the ground, and by the end of it we were very aware of the different nuances. Watching how the team did their field work gave us a bunch of ideas and plans around workflows and constraints that will shape our new treatment system. Ultimately, a solid grounding on how people do their work means that we can build tools that actually help them, and make their lives easier… which is precisely what we have been engaged to do.

What really struck us was that monitoring and treatment of mosquitoes is one of many areas of work these Environmental Health Officers need to attend to – so streamlining data discovery, collection and reporting is critical to our project success. The learning process for us as developers is a continual one, and trips like this one are a great way to build up that knowledge.

Our first version of the treatment system will focus on spot treatment – while larval monitoring is underway – and this will eventually connect to a chemical stock management system we are currently working on, so that chemicals are automatically used from a managed stockpile.  We’ve also looked in the past at aerial treatment systems (i.e. helicopters!) and we’ve still got some way to go to revisit how to deal (in our system) with large treatment areas using these sorts of treatment workflows and stock management methods.

The Atlas continues to be developed as we write this blog, thanks to additional funding from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services; and, we’ll be producing an update to the system for all groups who use it at the end of the mozzie “season” (which isn’t that far away!).  We did get to demonstrate some of these new features at a sneak peek we did after the treatments “field trip” at the local City of Bayswater offices, to a number of the Local Governments that are already using the Medical Entomology component of the Atlas, along with the associated Mosquito Monitoring mobile app.

We’ll blog about the release and new features in due course; but in the meantime, feel free to get in touch or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Chris

The post Mosquito Treatments appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We’ve blogged previously about the Atlas of Environmental Health – such as this blog – and this expansion to include other States has been something we have been working towards for a while, with presentations at a couple of conferences like the Mosquito Control Association of Australia, and the CRCSI Conference (that summary presentation is below).  A consolidated national view of mosquito populations, disease outbreaks and control methods across the country is one of the goals we have for the Atlas, so it was great to have Victoria on board with the project.

An update on the Atlas that I gave last year

From late November, we started undertaking some development of the Atlas to support the ability to have Victoria come on board, by adding in State level permissions, a few other tweaks relating to that, and then importing a year’s worth of trapping data from the Department’s lab.  Once that was done, we were ready to head east, and Tracey and I flew across to run training sessions in Swan Hill and Shepparton.  It’s always a bit nerve wracking running training, so we did a fair bit to prepare for the trip.  After a late flight into Melbourne and a good night’s sleep (sort of), we met up with Rebecca Feldman from the Department of Health and Human Services and got on the road to Swan Hill.  I have to say, the Bridgewater Bakehouse makes a fantastic sausage roll!

We undertook the first lot of training at Swan Hill which went well – in a great old building, the Town Hall.  We helped the Environmental Health officers get set up with the mobile app component, which is where they will use the system the most – collecting data on their mosquito traps and dips in the field.  We also gave them a relatively quick run-through of the web side of things, which they’ve been using to do some data QA and to also produce some reports on their areas.  That arvo we drove down to Shepparton and crashed overnight – that first day was a long day of driving, and training is quite exhausting as well – and then we ran a much smaller, but similarly structured, training session in Shepparton before hitting the road back to Melbourne.

We wrapped up the trip with a final session with the Departmental Regional Environmental Officers in the city, where we gave a quick run through again of the system, and explained to this team how they could get their Local Governments set up with the system, and what they needed to be aware of in terms of that setup.  We also had the lab team there who were able to see how they can log in, find the records that correspond with samples that they are sent, and update the species identification components of the trapping data.

Running training in the system in Melbourne

One of the best things about this trip was meeting a bunch of the on-ground staff for the training.  I always think that meeting the end users to discuss their workflows is critical to success – we’ve been doing the same thing for our citizen science programs for some time.  They explained to us how they work – and that’s quite similar to what we expected – but it was great to get confirmation we were delivering useful tools for them.  You can’t underestimate the value in talking directly to the people that are actually using your system!

Since the rollout the Victorians have quickly become ready and prolific users of the system.  The uptake in 2017 looks like we’ll overtake our previous annual data volumes in the first three months of the year!  Meanwhile, Tracey has been handling any of the support requests really well under our new support processes, put in place by James.

We’re also now planning to work with the Departmental staff to roll the system out to a range of additional Local Governments, and I did a quick trip back to Victoria a few weeks ago to get that set up.  In addition, in the coming months we’re going to add in our first treatment system components for the Medical Entomology module, as the Victorian department invests further in the system to get additional functionality implemented.  We’ll post more blogs on that, and a few other directions that we’re moving in with the Atlas, in due course.

In the meantime, we’ll be working hard on delivering additional functionality through the Victorian investments, loading additional historical data into the system, and we’ll be heading back to Victoria to do some more training and rollouts.  In the meantime, keep an eye out for us via our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages, or drop me an email.

Piers

The post Expanding the Atlas to Victoria appeared first on Gaia Resources.